Thursday, March 5, 2015

Book: God’s Battle Plan for the Mind

<-In the interest of honoring my commitments, I’ve got a book for you today. Regular blogging returns next week.

“What do you think about meditation?” is one of those loaded questions in some Christian circles. While one can readily find the word “meditate” in most English translations of the Bible, the multi-cultural setting of America causes us some difficulty in determining just how to put that word into practice. Meditation, as a spiritual practice, lacks a single meaning.

Into that debate comes David W. Saxton’s God’s Battle Plan for the Mind. The subtitle, “The Puritan Practice of Biblical Meditation,” gives you the value of the work. He provides the historical concepts used by the Puritans when they “meditated,” allowing the reader to properly understand where that practice fits with some modern suggestions of meditation.

Overall, the Puritan concept of meditation is much more active than many ideas put forward today. Saxton presents the idea of an intentional process of reflecting on the content and context of Scripture, followed by an active effort to determine application to life.

I like this book as a personal study tool. The often-wordy Puritans are summarized well, fitting with the reading needs of the more hurried days we live in. Further, modernized language makes them more readily accessible.

This is certainly a bigger answer to “What is meditation?” than many people are looking for, but if you are willing to invest a little over a hundred pages, the answer is here.

Free book in exchange for the review.

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